“Just for a little while,” my mother had said. Just until we get back on our feet.
Three years later they had not gotten back on their feet, or rather they seemed perpetually positioned just at the edge of stability, always within reach of it but never quite arriving. There was always another crisis, another unexpected expense, always a reason why this month was particularly difficult. I never questioned it. Questioning felt like doubt, and doubt felt like the kind of daughter I had been raised to be ashamed of becoming.
Lily’s fifth birthday was three weeks out when I began planning the party. She had been talking about it with the intensity of someone overseeing a significant state occasion, requesting an all-princess theme with the absolute certainty of a child who has not yet learned that wanting something and getting it are not the same thing. We were planning it on almost no budget, which meant I was making the cake myself and buying decorations from the dollar store and staying up late cutting out paper crowns for party favors while old television episodes played on the free streaming app. Marcus helped me address the small stack of invitations. Six children from Lily’s kindergarten class, their parents, and my parents.
I called my mother three weeks in advance, which Marcus had suggested, gently, in the way he suggested things when he knew I needed to do them but was not sure I would remember.
“Lily’s birthday is October fifteenth,” I told her. “A Saturday, two in the afternoon. Can you and Dad make it?”
There was the sound of pages turning, a brief pause. “October fifteenth. Yes, that should work. We’ll be there.”
“Lily keeps asking when Grandma and Grandpa are coming.”
My mother’s voice warmed in the way it sometimes did when grandchildren came up. “Tell her we’re bringing something special.”
I called again two days before the party, just to confirm. My mother sounded mildly annoyed at the check-in, told me they were not senile, that they would be there at two, that I worried too much. I hung up feeling slightly embarrassed about having called at all. They were coming. Of course they were coming.
The morning of October fifteenth was the kind of autumn day that Portland occasionally produces as if apologizing for all the gray ones: crisp air, warm sun, leaves just beginning to turn gold at the edges. I was in the kitchen at seven in the morning making the cake, already covered in flour, humming along to the radio. By noon the apartment looked like something from a children’s party catalog, insofar as a modestly furnished two-bedroom can look like that. Pink and purple streamers crossed the ceiling. A banner I had hand-lettered hung over the couch. The cake sat in the refrigerator with pink frosting and purple flowers I had piped around the edges with a bag and tip I had borrowed from a coworker, not perfectly, but with a care that I thought Lily would recognize.
